Past the Point of No Return
by iamhere23
Summary: Death!fic, please read warnings. It was a strange feeling, wanting to die. Normally, people spend their whole existence trying to do the exact opposite, wanting the exact opposite. How do you get to the point where you can't stand life anymore?


This is a **Death!Fic**. Please read the following warnings if you think it might be triggery.

**WARNINGS:** Major Torture, Hunger, Hallucinations, Convulsions, Murder, Death of major characters, Suicide

Title is from 'The Phantom of the Opera'. Beta credit belongs to the wonderful **deej1957**!

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It was a strange feeling, wanting to die. Normally, people spend their whole existence trying to do the exact opposite, wanting the exact opposite. How does one get to the point where you can't stand life anymore? A point where one more moment in this world means losing yourself. A moment when you stop being. Peter couldn't stand one more moment. Not if that moment meant going on living as a monster. Not if it meant living without a soul.

_A month before_

It had been quick and methodical, and it couldn't have taken more than a minute. They came, they blasted the door of the van open, and they killed the driver. Peter watched in horror at the splattered brains of the man on the window. There was blood everywhere. They took Peter's gun and put a bag over his head. He tried to call out to Neal, to make sure he was okay, but he never got a chance. They knocked him out.

The room where Peter woke up was small and completely closed off from the world. There was a toilet and a torn mattress on the floor. They dumped him inside and they made him wait in the darkness for what felt like days. He tried everything, every single thing he could think of, but there was no way out.

He was cold. It was always so cold.

There were five men. They took him out to a room at the end of a corridor and tied him to a chair. They left and returned carrying another man. Peter could have wept with joy. He had been half out of his mind alone in that room thinking that they had killed Neal. His joy was short lived once he realized Neal's state. He was naked, bruised and bleeding, but he was conscious.

They sat both of them in the middle of the room, facing each other. They sat there, day after day, an eternity of moments. Peter sat there and watched as they beat him, burned him, and whipped him. He sat there tied up, gagged, weak, and stared at them torturing Neal. He sat there incapable of doing anything but trying to hold on to sanity and to the only connection to reality that he would ever find in that place. Day after day, blue eyes met brown eyes from across the room, and they tried to hold on, they tried to at least remember who they were.

It took a week for Peter to break. When they carried him back to his hell hole of darkness and cold, he begged. He begged and he promised and he threatened, and it made no difference. Nothing he ever said made a difference. They beat Neal and tortured him and made him watch, and then they turned around and started beating _him _and torturing _him._

They wanted something, they kept asking Neal for something, and Peter couldn't understand how Neal could let this go on. After they whipped Peter for the first time, they asked Neal again. They threatened to keep hurting Peter, to keep hurting him until Neal gave them something. Peter raised his head and it only took one look at the terrified blue eyes across the room for him to understand. Neal didn't know. He honestly didn't know the answer to their questions.

After a while, Neal started making things up. He told them whatever they wanted to hear. He tried conning them. He made offers. He pleaded. He stopped when they started laughing. Peter's confused mind took more time than Neal's to understand. Then, to his horror, he realized that they knew. They knew there were no answers to the questions and they didn't care. It was a twisted game, one that couldn't be won. A game that never stopped. They kept torturing them and asking the same questions over and over again.

One day, after they were both reduced to a state of nothingness, they left them together. Peter didn't know what to think of it. They were always kept apart, never left alone, and never allowed to speak to each other. They put Neal with him in his small, dark, putrid smelling room. They gave Neal a knife and threw him beside Peter on the mattress.

They tried escaping, they tried everything until it dawned on them.

There was no way out. There was no one coming.

Peter tried to cover Neal's broken body with his own. He held him in his arms and talked to him for hours, days. Neal tried to talk back, but there weren't many words that came to him. _God. Please. Peter_._ I'm sorry. Peter, Peter, Peter…_

Peter heard his name uttered in every tone imaginable, and just held him. He held Neal close and shut his eyes trying his hardest not to lose control, trying so hard to keep his sanity.

_I'm here, buddy. I'm here, Neal. I'm here. I'm with you. _

Neal's wounds got infected. Peter could feel the heat radiating out of the crumpled body beside him. He tore up his shirt in the dark and crawled over to a corner where drops fell down from a leak in the roof. It was their only source of water. He gathered whatever strength he had left and carried Neal to the drip and got him to open his mouth. He used the strips from his shirt to try to clean Neal's wounds, to wipe his fevered brow.

If it was hard at first, it became unbearable when Neal started screaming. The hallucinations and pain working overtime to try to obliterate all reason. It was worse than watching them torture him. Peter had him in his arms and he couldn't help him.

After two days, the fever seemed to ease up a bit. Neal cried, and told Peter that it was alright. He begged him to do it. There was no light, and Peter couldn't see. He couldn't see Neal's eyes, he couldn't see if he was telling the truth or not. He didn't know if he could trust him, if he could trust himself. His own pain and hunger were excruciating.

It didn't matter in the end. Neal convulsed, one, two, three times. The fourth time he came back, he begged him once more. Two words this time. Two words over and over again. _Please Peter. Please. P'ter… please. Please._

Silence and then, a litany of _I'm sorry._

Peter waited for him to calm down. He held Neal in his arms, rocked him, and shushed him tenderly. He kissed his forehead, pushed his hair out of his eyes, and held his hand. Peter grabbed the knife and slit his throat.

Then, for that one moment, that single moment between the death of his best friend and his own, Peter lost himself. He lost who he was. He stopped being human. Isn't that what it takes to be able to welcome death? The soulless monster in that room lay the corpse down beside him and closed the sightless eyes carefully. He grabbed the knife and made his way to hell.

The end.


End file.
